As everyone is now aware, my last day at Global Health Trax is fast approaching. What few people expected was for GHT to lose both of their programmers in the span of a week.

Allow me to explain.

Since January of last year, GHT has had two programmers, Evan and myself. Evan’s responsibility was the Windows-based software and database; mine was the Linux-based web sites. This was the norm until November. On the 29th of November, Evan reported to work for the last time. After that, I was on my own with the Windows-based software. Not very pleasant for me, but not very difficult, either.

A couple of weeks after Evan’s departure, Art had me interview Larry as a replacement. Poor Larry was hired against my recommendation. He was obviously not a Windows programmer, but that’s what we hired him to do.

Larry was fired today. Ouch.

To add insult to injury, the human resources manager has an e-mail template she uses to announce someone’s departure to the entire company. One I’ve never known her to use except when an employee is let go for less than amicable reasons. In any case, her messages always read,

Hi Everyone,

Alice is no longer an employee of GHT, but we wish her the best in her future endeavors.

Thanks,
Kristen

Obviously, this message isn’t sent until after she has had the chance to escort the terminated employee out of the building. Wouldn’t want anyone to catch wind of their imminent separation from a steady paycheck.

That’s how I knew Larry had been fired. He had been summoned upstairs by a phone call. This by itself is not unusual, so I thought nothing of it at the time. When he returned, he was accompanied by Kristen, who hovered over him as he gathered his personal belongings. Then, just like that, they were gone. My cage suddenly felt very quiet and lonely.

I never liked Larry much, and I didn’t feel he was the most competent of programmers. I’ve been told that he broke more things than he fixed. Still, I find it interesting that GHT would want to go from two programmers to none so quickly. I imagine they have a backup plan in mind that involves consultants. I can only guess at what disasters that will cause.

I am absolutely euphoric right now.

I have just accepted an offer from Qualcomm. Senior IT Engineer. I don’t know what I will be doing just yet. Only that it involves Perl and support of Qualcomm’s chip engineers.

My last day here at Global Health Trax is the 22nd. A little over a week away. That should be enough time to put together some documentation so that I don’t leave them completely high and dry. I was tempted not to give any notice at all, and I certainly didn’t want to give a full two weeks.

Since I stopped telecommuting and started working in the office in January 2005, I have been miserable. Every day, all I can think about is how much I hate my job.

The IT department constantly got short shrift. Requests for new servers were met with incredulous stares. We were moved so the VP (“America’s Video Coach”) could have a video room. Then we were moved again to a corner of the warehouse, where a cage door was put in place for fake security. Our warehouse location was adjacent to the training room, so I got to listen to our binary plan pitched in Spanish all the time.

The business model made me feel dirty and worthless. I wrote programs that enabled our distributors to get paid for doing very little. As I met other programmers in the small business network marketing industry, I realized that very little talent is attracted to the market. I spent my time wondering how I ended up here.

I can’t stand most of my coworkers. I’m not sure how many of them have even completed high school. Companies have to pay for talent, and I guess we wanted to save money.

I can’t wait to leave. I’m never looking back.

Qualcomm, on the other hand, excites me. I told Evan once that I had an offer from a professor in college to be his graduate student and work with high performance compute clusters. How did I end up doing web programming for a network marketing company? Suddenly, my dream has come true. I’ll be working for the company that Forutne rated the 23rd best company to work for in 2006 and is number 381 on the Forutne 500 in 2006. Not only that, but I will be directly involved in support of a high performance compute cluster. It took me over six years, but I’m finally going to be doing what I’ve wanted to do since I graduated.